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Abnormal genital discharges, corpses and creeping things—confronting these unpleasant realities in the Priestly purity regulations of the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Leviticus 11–15; Numbers 19) is too much for many people, scholars included, to stomach. Nevertheless, a brave few have attempted to find some redeeming value in this corpus by deciphering the meanings concealed within this systematic code. Despite their efforts to uncover a discourse on abstract social or theological categories, the gruesome details of these stipulations are not particularly hospitable to interpretations that are rooted in an abstract, disembodied mode of rationality. One need not deny, however, that these laws are logical. On the contrary, the project of this article is to elucidate the pervasive logic of these laws as an expression of embodied rationality. By emphasizing the grounding of language and thought in bodily experience (through reference to modern “embodiment theory”), I will venture to provide a more satisfying account of the biblical concept of “pollution” (ṭumʾah) as based on several distinct images or models by which this notion was conceptualized in ancient Israel. To a certain extent, this line of inquiry was initiated by Paul Ricoeur’s study The Symbolism of Evil, which sought to trace changing conceptions of evil in the Western tradition back to their ancient Israelite and Greek origins. Starting from the principle “the symbol gives rise to thought,” Ricoeur recognized the indispensable role of concrete images in the articulation of religious intuitions.1 Put simply, Ricoeur’s investigation was based on the realization that religious experience is mediated by symbols, and accordingly, that an analysis of symbols can reveal a history of earlier conceptions. Unfortunately, this important first step

Contagion and Cognition: Bodily Experience and the Conceptualization of Pollution (ṭumʾah) in the Hebrew Bible